Beyond Health Literacy: Navigating Boundaries and Relationships During High-risk Pregnancies

Abstract

Few studies in HCI4D have examined the lived experiences of women with pregnancy complications. We conducted a qualitative study with 15 pregnant women to gain an in-depth understanding of the context in which pregnancy takes place and everyday experiences living with complications in rural North-West India. To complement our interviews, we conducted six focus groups with three pregnant women, three community health workers and three members of an NGO. Our study reveals insights about the challenges and experiences of the pregnant women with complications while navigating the physical, spatial, social and emotional aspects of antenatal care as part of complex and contradictory structures and settings of their everyday life. We argue that the design of digital health in support of pregnancy care for the Global South must center around supporting the navigational work done by the pregnant women and their families.We summarize research in two areas including an overview of public health strategies and challenges to improve maternal health in India, and digital health in the Global South, with focus on the Indian context.

The COVID-19 Infodemic: Women and Digital (Health) Literacy

“…The more active use of WhatsApp predicts a higher score of digital literacy competence and a stronger correlation. As women's behaviors are shaped by sociocultural and material practices that are embedded into their everyday lives, it is important that digital health design interventions carefully consider this embeddedness and experiential knowledge to explore the design space on how to support women's literacy on the COVID-19 in their ongoing efforts to navigate social relationships, information, and advice at different levels and from multiple sources (Bagalkot, et al, 2020). The social networks of men and women can be a tool to map and identify the most powerful node(s), who deliver information more frequently than others.…”

Digital mediation of candidacy in maternity care: Managing boundaries between physiology and pathology

“…The maternity care infrastructure imposes J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f structural constraints on women and professionals because of time, space and resource limitations (Gui & Chen, 2019) and brings attention to all the hidden work required to maintain care infrastructures (Weiner & Will 2018). Our narrative synthesis has highlighted how women utilise digital technologies to interact with the complex, often fragmented maternal healthcare infrastructure (Bagalkot et al, 2020;Gui & Chen, 2019). 'The complex, messy, and unevenly distributed nature of infrastructure requires that individuals be in continuous negotiation with it' (Erickson & Jarrahi, 2016).…”

Community-based Co-design across Geographic Locations and Cultures: Methodological Lessons from Co-design Workshops in South Africa

“…The first community engagement workshop took place at a community-based research center in Sweetwaters. Sweetwaters is 97Km outside Pietermaritzburg in the uMgungundlovu district and is zoned as a rural area with a household income of R2,400 per month 4 ($1 = R14.68). This community comprises of around six hundred thousand people and is representative of the Zulu population in KZN with 100% of the population listed as Zulu speakers 5 .…”

“…3.4.1 Developing Challenge and Design Cards. As visual methods have shown their potential to actively engage with the community while capturing maternal health lived experiences [3,4], we designed a collection of challenge and design cards (see figure 1) to visualize the identified challenges and aid the discussion and brainstorming of potential solutions. Design cards have been successfully used to graphically depict complex concepts, facilitate brainstorming, share understanding [34,47], and to facilitate codesign while developing sensitivity and empathy [2,31,37,57,64].…”